the times december 2014 - timetable

The Times December 2014

A journal of transport timetable history and analysis

Inside: When the Riverina left town

RRP $4.95 Incl. GST

2 The Times December 2014

The Times A journal of the Australian Timetable Association Inc. (A0043673H) Print Publication No: 349069/00070, ISSN 0813-6327 December 2014 Vol 31 No. 12, Issue No. 371 The Times welcomes all contributions. Our Authors’ Guide will soon be available on our web-site Reproduction Material appearing in The Times may be reproduced in other publications, with an acknowledgement. Disclaimer Opinions expressed in our magazines are not necessarily those of the Association or its members. Editor, The Times Geoff Lambert 179 Sydney Rd FAIRLIGHT 2094 NSW [email protected] A full AATTC contact list can be found in our current Members News, at http://www.aattc.org.au/newsletter.pdf Colour PDF versions of our magazines are at http://www.aattc.org.au

JIM WELLS HOW FAST TURBOPROPS? 3

ALBERT ISAACS UNBALANCED TRAINS 5

CHRIS BLOWER ROUTE 101 5

CONRAD SMITH THE NAMBUCCA AND ROSCREA PROBLEM 5

YOSHIKI SOGA THE STORY OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE TIMETABLES IN JAPAN 9

VARIOUS WHO PUT THE TIME INTO TIMETABLES? 16

COMMISSIONER A NEW STANDARD IN COUNTRY TRAIN SERVICES 18

The Times December 2014 3

How Fast TurboProps? JIM WELLS

O n November 17th Qantaslink com-menced services from Australia’s newest airport, Brisbane West

Wellcamp Airport (code WTB). The air-port is near Toowoomba, Queensland and has been privately built.

The timetable for a Tuesday is shown on the next page.

It’s a pity that Qantaslink doesn’t have an evening service from Toowoomba.

What is interesting about the timetable for the services to Sydney is the apparent speed.

Ignore the quoted ‘duration’ times, these have been miscalculated. Be aware also that Sydney for the date shown is on East-ern Daylight time, Wellcamp on Eastern Standard Time, one hour behind as Queensland doesn’t have daylight saving.

One wonders if the aircraft used on the morning southbound works back on the first northbound. Probably not as the turna-round time in Sydney is only fifteen minutes.

Also of interest is the stabling of the air-craft at Wellcamp overnight, which indi-cates that Qantaslink has confidence in the security arrangements provided.

The block time (off blocks to engine shut down) southbound is 1hr 35min. If we were to travel from Brisbane to Sydney the time would be most likely the same. But Brisbane:Sydney is serviced by jets, Too-woomba by turboprops. How come the Toowoomba service is so fast?

The Distances From website shows the Brisbane:Sydney route as being 733km, Toowoomba (CityAirport):Sydney as 706km, almost the same. One can presume that the Wellcamp to Sydney distance would be similar.

Ignoring this, there are two aspects to con-sider: ground time and flight time, the latter being dependent principally on cruise speed. For a primer on aircraft cruise speeds see the box.

At Wellcamp the ground time, i.e. the time between blocks off to take off, would be very short. The terminal is close to the runway and there would be no delays queuing behind other aircraft or waiting turn for take off between arrivals. This would not be the situation at Brisbane airport, which is quite large and busy.

The other point is that turboprops tend to have shorter ground times at airports gen-erally than jets. They don’t use aerobridges so there’s no push back and with good field performance their time on runways tends to be shorter. For example a turbo-prop landing on Sydney’s 34R runway (main North:South) will turn off the run-way not too far from terminal 2 and so will have a short taxi.

Now to cruise speed. The aircraft that Qantaslink uses on this service is a twin engined 76 seater DHC8-400, recent ver-sions being known as a Bombardier Q400. Seat pitch is 31in, seat width 17in.

DHC stands for de Havilland Canada. They were well known for the DHC4 Cari-bou STOL airlifter used by the RAAF for many years and the DHC6 Twin Otter, much loved by small airlines flying very short distances.

Their first attempt at the Fokker F27 Friendship (the aircraft that dominated regional services in the 60’s and 70’s) replacement market was the DHC7 of 1975. Only 113 were built up to 1998, the difficulty being that the aircraft had four engines which made it expensive to buy and operate.

The DHC8 first appeared in 1984 as a twin engine version of the DHC7. Over one thousand have been built and more are on the way, including some for Qantaslink.

What is remarkable is how the type has morphed from the 100 series (cabin length 9.1m, cruising speed 500 km/h) through the -200 and -300 series to the -400 series (18.8m, 667 km/h) first introduced in 2000. The penalty for this change, apart from cost, is a much longer take off run for

the series 400.

The 400 is very long but low to the ground; pilots would need to take great care when taking off and landing to avoid the dreaded tail scrape.

de Havilland Canada was sold to Boeing and subsequently to Bombardier who are big in railway equipment too.

Time for a sanity check. Qantas’ flight time for a Q400 Sydney to Albury flight is 1hr 10 min. Distance is 462 km. Too-woomba is another 244 km which at 667 km/h should take a bit over 20 minutes. So the time flight time for Toowoomba (1hr 35/40min) looks quite reasonable.

If the block time for turboprops on short sectors is not much longer than for jets why don’t the airlines use them more? Indeed they tend if both front and rear doors are used to have very quick passen-ger boarding times so for passengers the time from entering the plane to leaving it after landing, which can be much longer than block time, is shorter. The offset is having to cross often wind swept and rainy tarmacs.

The lack of large bins for cabin baggage is also an issue.

No aircraft manufacturer offers a large turbo prop at this time. The view in the Unites States is that passengers regard anything with propellers as old fashioned. This has encouraged the makers of smaller jets such as Bombardier with the CRJ and C series and Embraer (E-jet series, 80 pas-sengers up, Virgin Australia has some) to maintain their business.

In any case the difference between turbo props and jets has diminished over time. Modern jets use high bypass engines where a large proportion of the air compressed by the front fan doesn’t go through the rest of the engine. To this extent the fan is operat-

ing as a propeller.

.


Aircraft Speeds

(Note: data has been sourced from Wikipe-dia and other references and may not be consistent, nor applicable to all variants of the type of aircraft mentioned.)

The concept of maximum speed is of little value for commercial aircraft. It would be achieved with an unpractical fuel load and an uneconomic payload.

What is normally quoted is cruising speed; sometimes with either maximum payload or maximum fuel.

Regular passenger transport reached criti-cal mass in the 1930’s with the all metal Douglas DC3 and, to be fair, the Junkers J52/3 (Hitler flew in these). The DC3 cruised at about 250 km/h; flights between Melbourne (MEL) and Sydney (SYD) took about 4 hours with a stop at Wagga Wag-ga.

The Victorian Railway’s Commissioner at the time, Sir Harold Clapp, took this trip and was mightily impressed. He can’t have suffered a weather or technical delay.

After the Second World War larger pres-surised aircraft such as the Douglas DC6B came into service at speeds around 400 km/h and times for MEL:SYD came down to around 2 hours.

Then we got the first turboprops. The Vickers Viscount was smallish and not much faster than the DC6B; passengers liked it for smoothness so there occurred the infamous 2 for 3 swap of aircraft be-tween the airlines of the time, TAA and ANA.

The aircraft though that made the differ-ence was the Lockheed Electra introduced

by both domestic airlines about 1958 (and Qantas). Cruising speed was now 650 km/h; block times came down to MEL:SYD 1 hr 20 min; SYD:MEL 1 hr 30 min.

It’s interesting that the early jets such as the Boeing 727 had cruising speeds higher than later models. The 727 entered Aus-tralian service around 1964; cruising speed was 980 km/h. MEL:SYD was traversed in 1 hr 10 min; SYD:MEL 1 hr 15 min, only a few minutes less than the Electra. The 727 had a rear stairway under/between the engines as well as the usual front door so loading times were short.

As is well known times on MEL:SYD have blown out to 1 hr 20/30; the same as the Electra of nearly 60 years ago. Reasons include slower aircraft (the Boeing 767 cruise speed is only 910 km/h), the third runway at Sydney (“we have a lot of driv-ing to do”) and the increased likelihood of traffic delays both on the ground and in the air.

What is unfortunate for Qantas passengers is that airline’s policy of not using the rear door on Boeing 737’s as Virgin do at air-ports with aerobridges.

For the record the Boeing 737-800 cruise speed is 828 km/h; the competing Airbus A320’s is 900 km/h. This is a significant difference. Between MEL and the Gold Coast (OOL) Tiger and Jetstar with A320’s have a two hour block time; Virgin with B737’s takes 10 minutes longer.

Turning now to regional turboprop aircraft, the classic Fokker F27 Friendship cruised at 480 km/h. Its replacements include the DHC7 (1975, 500 km/h, Fokker F50 (1987, 512 km/h), Saab 340 (1983, 467 km/h), and the ATR 42 (1984, 554 km/h).

The DHC8-400 cruises at 667 km/h, a clear 100 km/h faster than the other types mentioned.

It has competition from ATR in the form of the stretch of the ATR 42, the ATR 72 (1988) which Virgin operates. But this aircraft is in the twentieth century when it comes to speed – only 509 km/h.

Let’s compare the two very similar looking aircraft to see why the Q400 is so much faster. There are two aspects of note.

The first is wing loading; the higher the better for speed because of reduced drag but with an adverse affect on field perfor-mance. Wing loading for the Q400 at max-imum take off (MTO) weight is 464 kgs per sq m, for the 72-600 it is a much lower 374kg . Take off run for the Q400 (MTO) is 1,402m which, surprisingly is not much longer than the 72-600’s 1,333m.

Where the two really differ is with engine power. Both use the same basic engine, the Canadian Pratt and Whitney 100 series turboprop. The ATR 72-600 has PW127M’s with a maximum continuous rating of 1,953kw. The Fokker F27 had Rolls Royce Dart engines rated at 1,678 kw.

The Q400 uses the much more powerful three spool PW150A for 3,782kw, nearly double the power. To put this into perspec-tive for us railway types, a single engine on the Q400 has more power than any diesel locomotive operating in Australia.

Obviously this comes at a cost for airlines with worse fuel economy balancing greater aircraft availability and passenger appeal. For more on the engines see http://www.pwc.ca/en/engines/pw127m.


Three Letters ALBERT ISAACS, CHRIS BLOWER, CONRAD SMITH

Unbalanced Trains What a remarkable coincidence! In my letter which appeared in The Times for November 2014 (page 7) one of the two topics discussed were trains which, ac-cording to Public timetables, appeared to be unbalanced. My letter was actually written in September 2014 and little did I realise when I wrote it that VLine were about to introduce another such service in this category.

A news item in Table Talk for October 2014 explained that amongst the various Victorian timetable changes of 12th Octo-ber, there is now a fourth Up service Shep-parton-Melbourne, leaving Shep at 0515 Monday-Friday and arriving at Southern Cross at 0759. However, there are still only three Down services advertised in Public TTs.

So! What really happens?

This train is actually an extension of the existing 0631 from Seymour, arriving from Shep at 0620. The Shepparton train is formed by an empty cars set (N loco and N set) which is stabled overnight (or part of the night) at Seymour and now leaves Seymour empty cars at 0401.

When I wrote my letter to The Times, who would have guessed that there was about to be a contemporary example of unbal-ance trains? Hmm!

Historically, there is another example of unbalanced pass services on the Sheppar-ton/Goulburn Valley line. Obviously, it is easier from an operations perspective for a train to be split than for two trains to be joined, particularly if it’s a loco hauled train. For many decades, several Goul-burn Valley trains (Shepparton-Numurkah-Tocumwal/Cobram) were combined with Albury services on the Down, Spencer Street-Seymour, where they were split. On the Up, both the Goulburn Val-ley and Albury trains usually ran on com-pletely different paths right through to Melbourne, thus avoiding having to com-bine the trains at Seymour. Of course in this case, we see an unbalanced service that doesn’t require any empty running of the rolling stock. In some cases, there was an extra loco attached to the Down Spen-cer Street-Seymour, but it was more usual to provide the Down Seymour-Goulburn Valley with a loco from Seymour Loco Depot.

Albert Isaacs

Route 101

Somewhat belatedly, I am writing in response to your article in the June issue of The Times about the London 101 bus route.

During and just after WW2, I lived near Bexley, Kent, and had cousins who lived in Dagenham, Essex. Being a somewhat precocious public transport user, I remember well the first solo trip I made to visit my cousins. I would not have been more than 8 years old at the time.

After the eerily silent trip from Bexleyheath to Woolwich on the 696 trolleybus, I crossed the Thames on the Woolwich Ferry. I can still smell the warm lubricating oil emanating from the engine room.

Waiting at North Woolwich was a line of Guys on the 101 route, some in their wartime brown livery. There must still have been bridge damage because I recall being diverted through one of the Royal Docks itself.

I remember that at East Ham station I had to be lifted up to the ticket window by the passenger behind me. When my District Line train arrived at Dagenham Heathway, to my horror I discovered that I was to sole occupant of a carriage with manually-operated doors. I just managed to get them open enough to squeeze through on to the platform be-fore the train departed for Upminster.

My cousins moved soon after to Upmin-ster and I subsequently made many jour-neys to visit them there (sometimes using the Gravesend-Tilbury ferry). But that first trans-Thames trip has stuck in my mind ever since.

Incidentally, until its cut-back to Galle-ons Reach (which I assume is some-where in the vicinity of what I knew as the Beckton Gas Works slag heap), the 101 was one of a fast dwindling list of routes that had not changed since WW2. The only such route that I have left on the list is the 24 (Pimlico to Hampstead Heath) but maybe there are others.

Thanks for reviving the memory.

Chris Blower

The Nambucca and Roscrea Problems

Your article on the last page of this month's [November 2014] The Times needed three readings to realise just what was going on, and a quick spin on Google Street View confirmed my suspicions: two tracks, one platform, familiar to me as the Roscrea problem.

I was on the actual train which stopped in Roscrea at the abandoned platform whilst the opposing direction service occupied the one which is still in use. Tokens are ex-changed here via the signal box on the aban-doned platform.

Courtesy of the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine I was able to download the 2011 (next page, top) and 2012 (next page, mid-dle) pdf's which together with the 2013 [current, next page, bottom] pdf show the rise and fall of Roscrea's fortunes.

In 2012, to satisfy local demand, two even-ing trains were dispatched from Limerick to the junction on the main line at Ballybro-phy, each returning the same way. They crossed at Roscrea, but the giveaway is the presence of identical Saturday timings with no other train to cross: the weekday train simply stops at the abandoned platform to cross the other train but passengers are una-ble to get on or off.

At a push, a Nenagh to Roscrea passenger could run on to Ballybrophy and come back to the useable platform 66 minutes later, but Roscrea to Ballybrophy is impossible at this time. Presumably the extra train was not a success -- it lasted only the year.

Conrad Smith

Conrad wins the kewpie doll. The near-identical images below of passengers at each station, opposite the crossing loop explain it all.


H ow would you handover a ransom from an express train to a kidnap-per waiting alongside the tracks?

After all, the passenger cars are all air-conditioned, and the windows don't open....

This was the climactic dilemma of the 1963 suspense film High and Low by world-famous director Akira Kurosawa. The venue was the Kodama (Echo) Lim-ited Express, the pre-shinkansen crowning achievement of Japanese railways, making the run between Tokyo and Osaka in 6.5 hours. Kurosawa was inspired to make the film after reading Ed McBain’s novel King’s Ransom. However, the film’s adap-tation of handing over the ransom was achieved thanks to the complex schedules and on-time operation that are the pride of Japanese railways.

In such a railway powerhouse, Japanese railway timetables have long been a treas-ured necessity for travel, At one time, mil-lions were published monthly, making them hidden best-sellers. However, as an island nation, there are no cross-border services, so Japanese timetables have a definite Japanese flavour targeted at an almost exclusively Japanese audience. Few timetables have ever been mainly in Eng-lish or other foreign languages, with nota-ble exceptions being simplified versions distributed during the 1964 Tokyo Olym-pics and other expositions when many foreign visitors were in Japan.

Most of these rare timetables were taken abroad when the visitors left, so people in

Japan rarely glimpsed such items. Because timetables are a practical item that become useless as soon as the timetable changes, most were thrown away, significantly re-ducing the chance of finding remaining versions today. However, you might be lucky enough to discover a rare copy at a local flea market or in a used-book store, and if you do, this article could help you decipher it.

The Early Days

The worlds first steam-hauled passenger railway started In England with the open-ing of the Liverpool and Manchester Rail-way in 1830. Soon after, the first edition of Bradshaw's Railway Time Tables was published, becoming synonymous with rail travel, At that time, Japan was still ruled by a shogun, his daimvo (lord), and samu-rai (warrior), and any contact with the outside world was very restricted. It was to be another 37 years before Japan opened up to the world with the restoration of the Mejji Emperor. Japan's first railway started 5 years later in 1872 with a short 18-mile single track between Shimbashi in Tokyo and Yokohama. A year later in 1873, Thomas Cook published his first timetable, and Cook's timetables are still used world-wide today.

In the early days, Japanese railways were operated by foreigners working for the Japanese government. We can guess that these people worked in English, but wheth-er or not English timetables were released

to the public Is unclear. However, Japan was now being visited by businessmen,. traders and tourists from abroad, especially from North America and Europe, so we can easily imagine demand for foreign-language timetables as railway lines spread through the nation.

The first monthly timetable in Japan was the Train & Steamer Travel, Guide (Kisha Kisen Ryokou Annai), which was first published in 1894 for Japanese users, mak-ing it practically unintelligible to people who could not read Japanese. In addition to station names, even the numbers in the tables were in Japanese kanji characters instead of the Arabic numerals in general use today. The situation was the same for all timetables issued in Japan. For this reason, hotels with foreign guests would create and distribute booklets with sched-ules written in English. For example, the timetable issued in 1898 by The Grand Hotel had just six pages centred on sched-ules for lines between Tokyo and Kobe along with services to Hakone (Kodzu), Nikko, and Yokosuka. The Grand Hotel was a leading Western-style hotel in Yoko-hama but it burned down in the aftermath of the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake and was never rebuilt. The Hotel New Grand, opened later, bears its name today.

Incidentally, the Welcome Society was formed at this time by some businessmen and others to provide assistance to foreign visitors to Japan. As a part of their service, they produced and distributed English

The story of foreign language timetables in Japan by Yoshiki Soga


railway timetables. However, as the name suggests, it was a society characterized by the activities of interested progressive private citizens. There was no government movement to promote tourism to Japan at that time.

To catch up quickly with the already high-ly industrialized Western nations, latecom-er Japan put great effort into advancing its national power. It established government-run factories in various locations, working to develop an export industry. At the same time, Japan attempted to secure interests in mainland Asia and gain a greater say in international society through the 1894 Sino-Japanese War and 1904 Russo-Japanese War. In such an age, where railways were considered essential for industrial advance-ment and to a powerful war machine, new tracks were built in quick succession. Moreover, most private lines were nation-alized in 1906; private lines considered important in forming a nationwide network were bought out and operated by the gov-ernment. As a result, Japan’s 1500 km of government-operated railways in 1900 grew quickly to 7800 km by 1910.

Once the foundations were laid for govern-ment administration of nationwide rail-ways, it was natural for official passenger timetables covering the nationwide net-work to be published by the railway au-thorities. The government railways' timeta-ble issued in June 1910 differed greatly from the private timetables written in kanji characters because it used Arabic numerals and included English notes to allow use by foreigners. From hereon, the government railways continued issuing new official timetables at every train diagram change. Around this time, momentum gathered at government level to actively promote for-eign tourism to create international good-will and stimulate the economy by secur-ing foreign capital. In 1912, railway au-thorities, shipping companies, prominent

sia were not noted, because routes were disrupted.

The inclusion of colonial railways in the timetable of a colonial power was quite unusual. Colonies of western nations were generally far from their ruling country, so there was no merit in including them and timetables for western colonies covered just those regions. In India, for example, Indian Bradshaw noted schedules for South Asia and surrounding British territo-ries. In Malaya and the Dutch East Indies, local railway authorities and information bureaus issued timetables. In pre-World War II Japanese colonies, the local railway authorities—Government Railways of Chosen (Korea) and Taiwan Government Railways—issued their own timetables, but schedules for those railways were al-ways also included in timetables for main-land Japan. The timetable for the South Manchuria Railway (SMR), which was established in 1906 to annexe the Russian-established Chinese-Eastern Railway and reigned in NE China for the next 40 years, is also in the Japanese timetable. However, railways in SE Asia that were under Japa-nese control during World War II were not noted in the timetables at all.

Hand-in-hand with Rapid Growth of Railways

At the same time, there was a revolution-ary development in Japan’s timetables—the start of sales of the official government railways timetable, which had previously been only for internal use. It was in an 8 by 9-inch, 226-page format, and much larger than the B6 timetables issued by the pri-vate sector. In effect, it was the inaugural issue of the JTB Timetable, which is still issued today and reached the 1000th issue 84 years later in May 2009 with much media fanfare. With Japanese timetables becoming more substantial, English time-tables also changed from thin pamphlets to thicker book 'formats.

(Condensed timetables, January 1939)

hotels, and others sponsored the establish-ment of the Japan Tourist Bureau, the fore-runner of today's JTB, Japan's largest trav-el agency. Due to these developments, the government railways started issuing Eng-lish and Japanese timetables, marking the appearance of full-fledged English timeta-bles in Japan.

Let’s look at the details of an English lan-guage timetable for August 1918. The covers advertise places of scenic beauty in Japan, and this issue had a photograph of the peaks of the Northern Alps of Japan. The mountain areas of Karuizawa and the northern Chubu region were talked about and developed from the late 19th century by missionaries and other foreign visitors to Japan as a place to escape the sultry summer heat of the coastal Kanto Plain and the cover evokes this background. The book is 7.5 by 9 inches, and its format is Western style where it can be folded in half. It has 82 pages, and is bound with a fold-out index map in the middle. An inter-esting feature is the western Table Number format. By referring to the chart for the station name and Table Number at the beginning, one could easily find the rele-vant table for departures and arrivals. Times are in the 12-hour style with a.m., in light type and p.m. in bold, demonstrating the Western standard for timetable formats of the period.

Of course, services in Japan were covered, but the timetable also includes the Korean peninsula and Taiwan—Japanese colonies at the time. Inclusion of continental China and the note Connecting Service between Japan and Russia demonstrated the im-mense scale covered. Connections to Rus-sia were just one of the routes linking Asia and Europe, and after the Russo-Japanese War, this route was popularized as being much faster than ship. Due to international conflicts, such as World War I and the Russian Revolution, schedules within Rus-


Next, comes the English timetable issued in December 1931 by the Japan Tourist Bureau. At 7.5 by 5 inches, this Condensed Time Tables on Principal Lines was slight-ly smaller than previous timetables, but boasted a full 236 pages. The change to include many advertisements for gift shops and other businesses of interest to foreign visitors came about with the switch from an internal timetable 'to a timetable sold to the public.

It is filled with notes evoking images of the pre-war golden age of railways. Images of

trains gracing the covers include the Fuji and Sakura (Cherry Blossom) limited ex-presses running from Tokyo to Shimonose-ki in September 1929, which were named by public contest, and the Tsubame (Swallow, making its debut in October 1930 to connect Tokyo and Kobe in a rec-ord time of 7 hours.

A major change in the 1931 timetables compared to 1918 was the disappearance of the Table-Number format. To find arri-val and departure times for a station, first you searched for the line for that station on

the line map; then you looked for the page number for that line noted in red next to the line; and finally you opened the timeta-ble to that page. If you knew the line in advance, you looked in the index for the page with that line. The chart for station names and Table-Number that once graced the beginning of timetables was trans-formed to a chart for station names and pages that station names are on, but it was pushed to the back of the timetable.

The method of referring to schedules based on the page showing lines was the same as

(Condensed (military) timetables, July, 1951


that for Japanese timetables at the time. The timing and reason why government railways' timetables eliminated the Table-Number format and changed to page-number reference chart are unclear. Per-haps reassigning the Table-Number was considered a cumbersome task when new lines were opening and private railways were being nationalized. One point was that finding schedules using the page-number reference method imposed little burden on users because the rail network was physically isolated from other coun-tries and operated on a uniformly adminis-tered nationwide system. Each line had its own name, and geographical locations of places such as cities on lines were relative-ly easy to absorb by the general Japanese populace. For example, the Tokaido main line was well known as the line along the Pacific coast from Tokyo to Kobe, and the On main line was the line from Fukushima north to Yamagata and Akita. In addition, train operation was almost all line-based and very few trains ran on complex routes over multiple lines.

On the other hand, Continental European railways were characterized by complex networks crisscrossing the land; interna-tional trains carrying travellers from many countries ran across the entire continent. Consequently, the timetables could not be closed for a single country, and the con-cepts of direction and operation system were emphasized instead of a line in a sin-gle country. Stations themselves became the natural starting point for finding a schedule. The UK, an island nation like Japan, used the page-number reference method in Bradshaw’s Timetable, which was issued for many years in that country.

The 1931 timetables included international steamship routes and schedules that were not in the 1918 timetables, and also the schedule or the Tokyo-Dalian air route that started in 1929. The international steam-ship route schedules included the Japanese companies Nippon Yusen Kaisha and Osa-ka Shosen Kaisha as well as the round-the-world service of Robert Dollar Co. This ambitious feature of the English version

was not included in Japanese versions.

The route via Siberia, connecting Asia and Europe, came into the spotlight again when WWI and the Russian Revolution settled down. International connections between Japan via Siberia to Europe restarted in August 1927. The ‘connecting service between Japan and Europe’ in this timeta-ble noted the schedule and operation days. It was a long trip of about 14 days from Tokyo to Paris. The Asia-Europe route via Siberia was also noted in European timeta-bles issued by Thomas Cook and Germa-ny's Mitropa (a company running sleeper and dining cars). These timetables still evoke an image of the romantic age of rail travel before international air routes.

The Condensed Time Tables were issued irregularly afterwards. The March 1933 edition is interspaced with pictures of plac-es of Japanese scenic beauty, and includes bus schedules—especially services to vari-ous hot springs—buses had finally become a viable mode of transport. The govern-ment railways set up the Board of Tourist Industry in April 1930 as an organization to promote overseas travel to Japan. In an age when the country was actively starting to attract foreign visitors, the content of timetables evolved to meet the needs of tourists interested in Japanese culture and traditions. According to statistics for 1936, the year before war broke out between Japan and China, 42,000 tourists visited Japan; 17,000 were Chinese and Manchuri-ans.

Behind the emphasis on the uniqueness of Japan was a vigorous defence of the coun-try, which was under intense international criticism for military moves in China since the early 1930s. Timetables give a glimpse at the propaganda campaign to present Japan with a clean image using tourism. Railways in pre-war Japan were not classi-fied as strategic facilities, but areas near important ports and straits were designated strategic zones where photography and sketching were prohibited. These areas are clearly noted in the index map as early as 1931, signalling the approaching dark

times of war.

The cover of Condensed Time Tables for January 1939—the year that WWII broke out—has a fantastic image of a crane fly-ing over Mt Fuji draped in red sunlight (Aka-Fuji) like an ukiyoe colour print by Hokusal That was a delicate design evok-ing images of the Japanese folk tale of The Crane Lady, which was the basis for the theatrical performance of Yuzuru (Twilight Crane) made famous in opera. The cover, presenting no hint of the shadows of war, gives a feel for the final glow of Japan that attracted people through tourism. This is sobering when you consider the path of history thereafter, when Japan and this aesthetic beauty would be destroyed by war.

While trivial, the timetable text shows changes that tell of the sombre situation [our page 8, top]. The notes on train nick-names and station names show that the Fuji limited express between Tokyo and Shimonoseki is changed to Huzi Likewise, Tokyo’s Shinjuku entertainment district is written as Sirizyuku. This is because the spelling used when writing Japanese place names and other words in alphabetic letters was officially changed to one based on the Japanese language in 1937 to eliminate elements originating from English pronun-ciation. The background for that change was the increasing anti-foreign and nation-alistic thinking of Japan at the time with its worsening foreign relations.

The Chinese continental railway noted in the back of the timetable was no longer under the authority of Chinese Govern-ment Railways, and was being operated by the North China Office of SMR because railways in areas occupied by Japan in the war with China were operated temporarily by SMR. A new company, North China Railway, which was effectively an exten-sion of Japanese national policy, was es-tablished in 1939 to take over operation of these lines.

Japan eventually went to war with the USA and Great Britain on 7 December 1941, closing the country to peaceful inter-

(September, 1959)


action with the outside world for about 5 years. War timetables were filled with slogans inciting the will to fight, but by 1944—the year before WWII ended—new timetables were rarely issued due to the tack of resources as Japan’s position wors-ened.

Allied Occupation

Japan’s surrender on 15 August 1945 marked the start of the Allied occupation. Rail transport was put under General Headquarters (GHQ) supervision with the 3rd Transportation Military Railway Ser-vice responsible for administration. Rail Transportation Offices (RTOs) were estab-lished at major stations across Japan to provide guidance and issue tickets for Al-lied passengers. Many military personnel and journalists visited Japan during the occupation and rail was the main mode of transport due to lack of air routes and high-way networks. Naturally, there was a need for railway timetables foreigners could read.

The Japan Travel Bureau successor to the pre-war Japan Tourist Bureau, issued a 200page Japanese-language timetable in September 1945. However, after that they were only able to issue a booklet of just 16 pages due to difficulty in obtaining paper. It struggled to maintain a monthly for To-kyo and nearby areas. Although issued for Japanese it did have station names in al-phabetic letters, so it could be used by foreigners too.

Content covering just the Tokyo area was insufficient for use by GHQ who ordered the Japanese railway authorities to create a full-scale English timetable. While govern-ment railways were under the administra-tion of GHQ, it was in fact operated by the Japanese Ministry of Transportation so the Ministry of Transportation Liaison Office created the Condensed Railway Time Ta-bles marking the first full-scale, post-war English timetable.

Although the 34-page, A5 timetable was subtitled To & From Tokyo it actually covered the area east of Osaka to the Toho-ku and Hokkaido regions. It applied to a larger area and more lines than in the JTB version for Japanese. Furthermore this timetable used 24-hour notation, adopted by Japanese railways from 1942, and re-turned to the Table-Number format

The suffering at the time is seen from the content. Opening the front cover, there is a note saying “Owing to the shortage of coal supply, some of the trains may be can-celled for the time being”. Many train times had an X next to them meaning oper-ations on those sections were suspended for this reason. The railway authorities revised the schedule on 20 November, increasing the number of scheduled pas-senger trains by 26% compared to the war’s end. However, coal shortages forced

three reductions in passenger trains the following month, dropping the number to half the number running at the war’s end.

Although times were hard, GHQ-related transport had top priority. Special trains for GHQ personnel appeared one after another in 1946. The main trains were the Allied Limited and Dixie Limited connecting Tokyo and Kyushu, and the Yankee Lim-ited between Tokyo and Hokkaido. Trains for Japanese were also run with GHQ cars connected to them. Those cars were re-served for Allied personnel and hungry Japanese crammed into overflowing cars could not use them.

With the expansion of GHQ transport, English timetables became more substan-tial. The Sendai Railway Division and others even issued their own English time-tables for their administrative areas. The nationwide English timetable issued in December 1946 was a massive volume measuring 9¼ by 7¼ inches and 216 pag-es; it even included all regional lines. The back end has a list of nicknames given to passenger cars requisitioned by GHQ. It also includes the schedule for a military ferry operating between Hakata in Kyushu and Busan on the Korean peninsula. This might seem strange because Korea was supposed to have been liberated from Japa-nese control at the end of the war. Howev-er, South Korea, was still under US mili-tary control and not yet independent.

After the December 1946 issue, English timetables once again became simplified. For example, the July 1951 timetable was 56 pages and only included major lines. It was a folding type once common on Amer-ican railways. The end page tells how Ja-pan was once again open to general foreign tourism from December 1947 with nota-tions on how official travel for military passengers was handled, guidelines for non-official travel, and information for civilian passengers.

Famous hotels in various scenic locations such as Hakone and Nara had been requisi-tioned as R&R facilities for GHQ person-nel, and timetables for travel to such places were listed in a booklet issued by Japan Logistical Command in the 1950s. (The government railways were restructured as a public corporation in June 1949, and Japanese National Railways (JNR) was established. English timetables were issued under the JNR name).

However, Japan was not the only place where timetables were issued for occupa-tion forces, The US Military Railway Ser-vice created and distributed timetables for Europe after the German surrender and for the Philippines under US military admin-istration. The US-Railway Guide [our page 12] was issued as a timetable for military trains by the 0MG (Office of Military Gov-ernment) and later the 8th Transportation

Traffic Regulation Group in Germany. It mainly covered the western part of Germa-ny under the administration of the USA, UK, and France, but military trains to and from West Berlin are listed, giving evi-dence of the special tension in the German division and occupation.

Japan regained its independence in April 1952 when the San Francisco Peace Treaty came into force. The RTS were abolished and Japanese were permitted on Allied-forces trains on a limited basis. A leaflet distributed by JNR to Japanese about such trains noted that the trains could be called the first international trains in Japan and urged Japanese passengers to cooperate with on-train etiquette and keeping cars clean. For military passengers, it gave a disturbing caution to “Please take care of your belongings when leaving your seats”.

Rapid Economic Growth: Japan as a Major Political and Economic Power

The depressing occupation era eventually passed and English timetables from the late 1950s again became purely guides for tourists. In terms of the social situation, a 1956 Japanese Economic White Paper declared that the post-war period was over. From then on, Japan saw unparalleled rapid economic growth and was again working to attract tourists from abroad to stimulate the economy by securing foreign capital. The Japan Tourism Association was established to achieve this goal and efforts to promote inbound tourism to Ja-pan and build an environment for accept-ing foreign tourists accelerated. English railway timetables were an unsung hero supporting this policy. Incidentally, JNR’s English timetable was completely com-piled by the JNR Foreign Department and printed and bound by a Tokyo company. By contrast, French National Railways (SNCF) issued its English timetables far away in North America, listing internation-al trains and major domestic trains, thus demonstrating its commitment to attracting foreign tourists.

This period saw Japan’s railway industry undergo remarkable growth. Express trains revived in 1949 increased in number year after year, with the Kodama limited ex-press taking the famous supporting-actor role in the Kurosawa film debuting on the Tokyo-Osaka/Kobe route in November 1958 During this vibrant period, the back cover of the September 1959 English time-table proclaimed Going the Fastest and Smoothest—This is the Catch Phrase for Travel by JNRs Superb Limited Express Trains. This 1959 timetable introduced schedules for the limited express network covering Japan like a backbone from Aomori in the north via Honshu and Kyu-shu to Kagoshima in the south. At the time, there were 18 limited expresses running in Japan and the overnight Hayabusa (Falcon) took 22 hours 50 minutes to trave/from


Tokyo to Kagoshima The same journey takes just 1 hour 50 minutes by air today. While few people make this trip by rail now, it can be travelled by shinkansen in 7 hours 30 minutes. So, in just half a century, travel time has been shortened dramatical-ly. Even though it took a full day, such

trains were popularized in the 1950s and 60s as the most reasonably priced and fastest mode of transport for most people. This was JNR’s heyday.

A surprise when opening a timetable of that era is the number of train nicknames.

Although nicknames were reserved for limited expresses in the pre-war era, they were given later to local express and faster trains. They included the Fuji and Tsu-bame from before the war, the quaintly named Asakaze (Morning Breeze) and Gekko (Moonlight), as well as Aso and Nikko which evoke images of travel. There were also long-distance slow trains without a nickname. For example, Train No. 111 connecting Tokyo with Moji in Kyushu departed Tokyo at 14:20 and ar-rived at Moji 1100 km away the following day at 20:12. At the time, there were sev-eral expresses as well as slow trains that took 24 hours or more from departure to destination. Around the world, trains run-ning for more than a day are not rare, but it is unimaginable in Japan today with im-provements in train speeds.

Signs of increasing speeds are evident to some extent in timetables. The codes E and D represented electric and diesel rail-car trains, respectively. Around this time, electric and diesel-powered railcars began to be introduced for long-distance trains in addition to commuter transport in urban areas. The back of the timetable states JNR’S WAY IS THE NATIONS WAY is the motto of Japanese National Railways and is a driving force for its modernization program now underway. Electrification is given as the first item of that program. A program to add an additional 900 smoke-free kilometers to 'the 2,28 km of electri-fied sections (11% of total) in the next few years is mentioned. The Kodarna electric limited express connected Tokyo and Osa-ka in 6 hours 40 minutes, making same-day return business trips possible, and earning it the nickname Businessmen's Limited Express (if one was willing to ignore the fatigue of such a long trip). A speed test using those cars on 21 July 1959 reached a world record for narrow gauge of 163 km/h (101 mph) and is proudly mentioned.

By taking on such challenges, Japan’s railway engineers eventually succeeded in achieving the ultimate form for long-distance high-speed transport when the Bullet Train opened between Tokyo and Osaka in October 1964 just before the Tokyo Olympics—the first in Asia.

The English timetable issued by JNR at the shinkansen opening was a two-tone cover in the same ivory and blue as the shinkansen livery and bore the confident catchphrase of The Nations Progress Rides JNR. The shinkansen service started as 26 direct return trips between Tokyo and Osaka along with a few section trains. A few of the Series 0 cars (the first shinkan-sen train sets) remained in service until November of last year [2009], and many Japanese went to bid their fond farewells at the last retirement ceremony.


Although JNR was facing its first single-year deficit that year, few realized the un-certainties lurking behind such a golden age of rail and that Japanese railways would be forced to make major reforms 20 years later. Shinkansen construction ex-penses rising far beyond expectations was one cause. However, Japan’s era of high economic growth was showing no signs of slowing, and society as a whole was opti-mistic. The number of foreign visitors to Japan in 1964 was 350,000, a paltry num-ber compared to the more than 8 million today, but still a large increase from the pre-war levels. 1964 was also the year that JTB started tours for foreign visitors to Japan.

JNR had issued timetables for foreign visi-tors up to this point, but JTB took over that job from autumn 1965, starting sales to tourists abroad. This was no coincidence if one takes into account the close relation-ship between JNR and JTB at the time. Up to the 1987 JNR privatization, JNR over-saw JTBs timetables for Japanese and pur-chased a large volume every month for its internal use. Operation of JNR Station Travel Centres was also outsourced to JTB.

English timetables issued by JTB were titled Condensed Timetable Japan and the size was reduced to A6 after 1967 for easi-

er carrying. The guidance on how to ride JNR trains was actually in English and French. The timetables covered nearly all local express and faster trains in Japan along with schedules for trains on private lines to tourist destinations such as Hakone and Ise and the ferry schedule for the Kan-sai Steamship Company connecting Osaka with the hot springs area of Beppu. In that way, it had more substantial tourism con-tent than the timetable issued by JNR. Guidance to famous sites across the coun-try and addition of advertising was remi-niscent of pre-war timetables, but the addi-tion of departure times of international airlines in the back was a major difference. Airline times had been included in the Japanese version up to the early 1960s but were omitted due to lack of space with increased train runs. 1964 saw the return of overseas travel by ordinary Japanese but there were still some restrictions when travelling abroad. The numbers of Japa-nese travellers abroad did not increase immediately, so the absence of internation-al air routes was no major hindrance. Inter-national air routes in timetables for Japa-nese did not reappear for another 20 years- 1987.

JTB’s timetables for foreign visitors disap-peared at some point, but a mini-timetable was published later in October 1984. It was targeted mainly at business travellers, and

was limited to shinkansen, limited express-es, and expresses. It had line and station names in alphabetic notation next to the Japanese to assist foreign travellers.

Japan’s GNP became the world’s second largest in 1968, and the Worlds Fair was held in Osaka in 1970. In light of the ro-bust economy, new English timetables were issued again in the 1970s. The first issue of ABC Timetable of Japan bearing the same name as the famous UK publisher appeared in March 1973. However, the content was not in the UK style with sta-tion names listed in alphabetic order, and it used the traditional Western Table-Number format. In fact, the only connection to ABC of the UK was that it simply bor-rowed the ABC name. The timetable was ambitiously edited, as demonstrated by the relatively large number of bus lines to tourist destinations, but whether it was continuously published monthly is unfortu-nately not clear.

Looking at timetables of the era, we can see a major change from the 1950s to the mid-1960s. The variety of nicknames giv-en to trains dropped dramatically. Trains running on the same section were increas-ingly named in a Train Name + Number format. The 350 or so train nicknames in 1967 dropped to about 260 with the Octo-ber 1968 schedule change. This may have


been in preparation for computerized res-ervations. JNR started the world’s first MARS online seat reservation system in 1960 and set up Green Window reserved seat sales offices in major stations in an attempt to further increase seating capacity using the opportunities presented by the opening of the shinkansen. Computers of the time were quite limited in functionality compared to now, and attempts were made to reduce the volume of data that needed to be stored. Making guidance for passen-gers concise of course also drove this change.

This deviates a bit from the topic of for-eign language timetables issued in Japan, but I would like to introduce a topic of interest from 1977 Japanese railway schedules became a famous media over-seas and were widely distributed. The timetable published by venerable British company Thomas Cook had originally covered Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa under the name Continental Timetable, and it started listing railway schedules for North America in the 1970s It went even further in the January 1977 issue by changing the title to International Timetable and carrying railway schedules for the entire world, including Japan’s shinkansen and major conventional lines. It covered railways of developing coun-tries too, so Japan was not particularly singled out for special coverage. But with that publication, one could find an outline

of Japanese railways overseas. There were anecdotes, however, of various mistakes because AR's content check was insuffi-cient. The section of Thomas Cook's Inter-national Timetable excluding Europe was officially spun off in 1981, and is known today as the Overseas Timetable.

While it is unclear whether Thomas Cook’s coverage of schedules prompted JNR, it did start issuing the Japan Rail Pass in May 1981. Until that time, special fares for foreign visitors were available only for overseas tourist parties of 15 or more peo-ple with a certificate from the Japanese embassy and packages that included trans-portation fares and lodging on specific sightseeing routes. Japanese railways could not be said to have been very considerate to individual foreign travellers who wanted to travel freely at a reasonable price, but the appearance of the Japan Rail Pass like the Eurail Pass at last met that need.

Epilogue

JNR underwent a major transformation in April 1987 when it was privatized and split into several regional companies. This up-heaval coincided with the end of the Cold War, and the flow of people and goods was stimulated further by the appearance of a global society. Japan had been in a period of low growth but was blessed again with robust growth in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The country's place as a centre of global economy and culture along with

Europe and the USA was made even more distinct. Today, the Japanese government is promoting its Visit Ja-pan Campaign with the lofty goal of attracting 10 million foreign visitors in 2010.

Both the JR group as a whole and each individual JR company in the group-have been working to develop an envi-ronment to better accommodate foreign tourists. With the growth of the Internet and other information technologies, anyone can now find schedules and how to use Japanese railways from the comfort of their home. However, the JR companies still distribute the Railway Timetable in English with notes on shinkansen, limited express, and over-night train schedules to major travel agencies. It is issued when major changes are made to train schedules. JR Central also has an English timetable for the Tokaido and Sanyo shinkansen, and JR East has leaflets noting sched-ules for the Narita Express (airport access) services.

I am sure that the almost century-long history of foreign language railway timetables in Japan, sometimes at the mercy of difficult international circum-stances, will continue and will still provide a glimpse of the times when they were issued.

Yoshiki Soga: Mr Soja graduated in 1995 in transpor t economics from Waseda University's School of Commerce He currently works for Railway Information Systems Co.. Ltd. in the JR group of companies where he is involved with operation of JRs highway bus seat reservation system. His interest in railways and transport in general goes back to his schoolboy years, and he has been collect-ing domestic and foreign historical timetables as a hobby for more than 20 years He is the author of several books, including Reading World History from Transportation Timetables (Shakai Hyoron Sha, 2008). A short analysis of this book will appear in a forthcoming edition of The Times.

This article is the third of three articles reproduced verbatim from a special timetable-related issue of Japan Railway and Technical Review (JTR), #53 of September 2009. The other articles related to Thomas Cook timetables and to the 1000th issue of the JTB timetable. Readers will probably be aware that the situation relating to, for instance, the Thomas Cook timetables, has changed since Mr Soga wrote the article reproduced here.

November 2014 marked the 50th anniversary of the shinkansen. In a media release, it was stated that “Its average deviation of time from schedule is one fifth of a second. Trains now run on the most important route — Tokyo to Osaka — every four minutes.”


M r Stickybeak (a penguin, right) lives with his wife under the wharf at Manly. Last summer

they decided not to emigrate when their children left home. But they were waiting for the children when they came back home, precisely on schedule on July 21st. How did the kids do this? They might themselves wonder. I recall a cartoon in the Australasian Post, depicting two pen-guins standing on the beach at Cowes on Phillip Island, watching a caravan arrive in the caravan park. Says one to the other, “It’s unbelievable- here they are again – same family, same camping spot, same day, same time! It must be supernatural!”

In Spring 2013, the annual shearwater (mutton-bird) migration from Siberia to Australia went seriously wrong when the birds met a head-wind. They ran out of time and fell to the ground dead at the very moment they should have landed at their traditional nest sites.

What is going on here- do penguins and mutton-birds have a clock, or a timetable? Yes and yes and so do we- this story is about how we all got into this fix.

My mother once told me that one of her cousins never referred to a thing called a Time Table, but always to a “Skeddoool”, which was his pronunciation of “Schedule” This always sounded like a good idea to me. During the 2012 survey and subsequent discussions within AATTC about its name, the vast majority of contributors used the single word “timetable”, rather than the two words “time” and “table”. A discussion arose after our name change as to whether the new abbreviation for our Association ought to be ATA or ATTA

When, how and why did society manage to squash an adjective and a noun togeth-er? Timetable is a compound word, rather than a portmanteau word, but it still ad-heres to Humpty Dumpty’s explanation that, 'Y ou see it's like a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed up into one word.'

or duration of the several notes.

n. A tabular statement or scheme, show-ing the time when certain things are to take place or be attended: as, a school time-table, showing the hours for study in each class, etc.

n. Specifically— A printed table showing the times at which trains on a line of rail-way arrive at and depart from the various stations.

n. A collection of such tables for the rail-way passenger traffic of an entire coun-try, or of a district of country of greater or less extent. Also called railway- or rail-road-guide.

n. In musical notation, a table of notes arranged so as to show their relative dura-tion or time-value.

n. a schedule of times of arrivals and departures

n. a schedule listing events and the times at which they will take place.

But this is something peculiar to the Eng-lish language- as the NAOTC example cited earlier will testify. Other languages—even American—have their own special-ised lingo for transport timetables. If one uses Google Translate to obtain the foreign equivalents to timetable, it nearly always

Who put the time into timetables? Reflections from all over

Not that either timetable or “time table” are words familiar to all. While standing outside an NAOTC (National Associa-tion of Timetable Collectors) convention one day, a passer-by questioned myself and NAOTC’s John Wilkins as follows “What’s a “timetable”? It took an Aus-tralian to explain it to him- “It’s just a schedule”. “Doh”. He understood it then. A collector of schedules was something he could grapple with.

As Ian Jack points out (box), we have Tide Tables, but never tidetables- why? Google will offer you both “Time Table” and “Timetable” as the results of a search on either of the variations singly. If you search for tidetable (without the quotes), it will throw up results for “tide table” without even bothering to check back with you. But, if you ask it for “tidetable” it will question you- ‘Did you mean: "tide table"? Google will, howev-er, provide you with some true “hits” for the word- including a domain name which uses it.

Time Table was a word, therefore whose etymology pre-dated railways but almost certainly was generated by them.

In the tiny, circumscribed and introspec-tive world of ATA, the word timetable refers exclusively to a transport timeta-ble. This is also the most usual meaning attributed to it by dictionaries, some samples of which follow

n, A tabular statement of the time at which, or within which, several things are to take place, as the recitations in a school, the departure and arrival of rail-road trains or other public conveyances, the rise and fall of the tides, etc.;

n. A plane surface divided in one direc-tion with lines representing hours and minutes, and in the other with lines rep-resenting miles, and having diagonals (usually movable strings) representing the speed and position of various trains.

n. A table showing the notation, length,

Ian Jack wrote (at about the time the British National Rail Timetable disappeared): I was travelling to Manchester. This was fitting. Many new ideas once came out of Man-chester and among them was the timetable. There, in 1841, George Bradshaw, a Quaker printer and engraver, published the first volume of Bradshaw's Monthly Railway Guide. Advertising the departure and arrival of trains, and before them, mail coaches, wasn't new: coach companies had " “time bills", and the Liverpool and Manchester Railway announced its "scheme of departures" in the local press. Bradshaw's achievement was to collate the timings of trains run by different companies - by 1841 there were almost a thousand route miles of railway - and express them cogently and clearly in a grid system, destinations vertically and times horizontally, so they looked scientific, like logarithms or the tide ta-bles (the probable origin of the new phrase, timetable) that had been used by British har-bour-masters since the 16th century.

Look Ma!.. One Hand! When this clock was installed at the St James The Great church in Staple in Kent, the notion of timing life to the minute had not really surfaced.


returns words that are not right. An ex-ample is the following for Spanish: calen-dario, whereas we know from our own collections that the Spanish word for a transport timetable is horario. It is inter-esting that our founder Jack McLean proposed that we be called horariologists on this basis- but he didn’t convince any-one of this. A back translation of this word produces the English equivalent of “schedule”. These two-way translation mismatches hold true for most languages.

It is probably true to say that the contrac-tion “timetable” is an Americanism. This might be one reason why some non-Americans bristle at it. But bristling at Americanisms is a fraught business be-cause many Americanisms are really English Colonialisms, which failed to evolve once they were exported from Britain.

NSW Railcorp issued Time Tables until its dying day. Its successor Transport for NSW uses the compound word- at least for the Train Crew versions of its public booklets. Some railways – the Victorian Railways for instance—did not meet the challenge head-on, but fudged by choos-ing the hyphenated word “Time-tables”. Certainly they were more correct in using the plural for their book. It was a collec-tion of many timetables.

Time

St Augustine ruminated on the nature of time, asking, "What then is time? If no one asks me, I know: if I wish to explain it to one that asketh, I know not." He settled on time being defined more by what it is not than by what it is and con-cludes that it is the result of having a “soul”.

The notion of time took hold so firmly, that few paused to consider the implica-tions. J.G.Ballard, however, in his science fiction story, “Chronopolis” [extracts, next page) posits a future where clocks have been abolished because—as one character tells another—”If you can time how fast a person works at a job, then you can make him do it faster”. The hero of the story—a closet clock fanatic—visits the abandoned “time city” of Chronopolis and starts the old clocks running again. He is caught and punished with a long gaol sentence. He is overjoyed to discover that his cell is pro-vided with a clock. The story finishes: “He was still chuckling over the absurdity of it all two weeks later when, for the first time, he noticed the clock's insanely irritating tick... ”

Speed

James Gleick in his 1999 book “Faster– the acceleration of just about everything” made the point that the speeding up of modern life was really triggered by rail-ways (see box above). Indeed the concept of speed itself was crystallised by rail. At first, rail’s big selling point was that one reached one’s destination sooner (i.e. earli-er)– this was easy to see in the timetables. It was not long before the mantra changed to reaching one’s destination faster. This was not so easy to viualise in a timetable– apart from graphical schedules which, although they were invented at the same time as the timetable, caught on only with management. The term “Express Train” was introduced in 1871 by the Midland Railway in England. It was not long before analysts and popular writers took a fancy

to this and, within 10 years, any number of books and journals began to compare and contrast the speed of “Express Trains”.

Gleich’s book was written well before the invention of the smart phone. Alt-hough he was prescient about the general speeding up of life, I suspect even he must have been surprised by how the smart phone heightened our ability to achieve instant gratification and to rev up life’s pace by another order of magni-tude– timetables at your finger-tip.

Table

A timetable is a skedoool in “tabular form”.

The term "table" (that is, a piece of furni-ture) is derived from a merger of French table and Old English tabele, ultimately from the Latin word tabula, "a board, plank, flat top piece". In Late Latin, tab-ula took over the meaning previously reserved to mensa (preserved in Spanish and Portuguese mesa "table"). In Old English, the word was bord, replaced by "table" for this meaning. In medieval counting houses, the tables were covered with a piece of checkered cloth, to count money. Exchequer is an archaic term for the English institution which accounted for money owed to the monarch. Thus the checkerboard tables of stacks of coins are a concrete realization of this information.—there are rows and there are columns of stacks because the money needed to the allocated in two ways– for instance by person and by time period. People—especially money-counters—

It was only in the machine age that people became aware of speed as a quality that could be measured, computed, and adjusted. For the ancients, speed was indefina-ble. Before it meant velocity, Old English spede or sped meant something more like success and prosperity; "God speed" didn't mean "May God hustle you along." Aristotle struggled enough with the abstraction of motion; to pin down a concept of velocity required a precision in measurement—and a belief in the pre-cision of measurement—unattainable in the pre-Galilean, pre-Newtonian world. Languages had no words for the units of speed until the era of sail made necessary the quirky coinage knot (sailors measured their speed by heaving overboard a log tied to a rope and counting the evenly spaced knots as it played out). Even now, when the modern lexicon of units of measure includes joules and parsecs along with feet and pounds, the relative newness of speed shows up in a dearth of words: we almost always have to express speed in terms of a division of quantities: miles per hour, feet per second.

Before the machine age, few people had direct experience with uniform motion as expressed in Newton's equations. Steady speed first came with trains. The railroad bewildered passengers by causing familiar features of the landscape to float across their field of view at high speed. It did not take much speed to create amazing, strange sensations. “We flew on the wings of the wind at the varied speed of fif-teen to twenty-five miles an hour”, a first-time passenger wrote in 1830, “annihilating time and space”. A mental leap was needed from speed as an attrib-ute of planets and horses to speed as a variable, fine-tunable property. Machines let us make that leap. They gave us the everyday power to change a thing's speed by turning a dial or depressing a pedal.


are born categorizers (“splitters”) and would love to be able to slice and dice information in more than two ways. We live, however, in essentially a two-dimensional world when it comes to re-ceiving written information, so tables cannot have more than 2 dimensions with-out becoming confusing.

Arranging “data” by rows and columns was, however, a much older practice than this. Probably the earliest appearance of tabular material was in an Ephemeris (from Greek ἐφημερίς [ephēmeris, "diary, calendar"]) and the earliest of these seems to date from the 2nd millennium BC — Panchanga tables based on Jyotisha in the Vedic period of Indian astronomy.

Does it matter? No, it doesn’t amount to a hill of beans in the outside world. It prob-

ably matters only a little more to pedants like ourselves but even most of us will shrug it off and I suspect a great number of us never even noticed that we weren’t AATC or ATTA.

What seems certain however, is that hu-man life will continue to be subject to a myriad of ever-accelerating timetables for the foreseeable future.

The abandonment of Chronopolis is a long way off.

You and I are taking a trip.' 'Where?' Conrad asked. 'Back into the past,' Stacey said lightly. 'To Chronopolis, the Time City.'….

...'Thirty million people once lived in this city,' Stacey remarked. 'Now the population is little more than two, so that the city today is effectively an enormous ring, five miles in width, encircling a vast dead centre forty or fifty miles in diameter.'

...on all sides there were the clocks. Conrad noticed them immediately, at every street corner, over every archway, three-quarters of the way up the sides of buildings, covering every conceivable angle of approach. Most of still retained their hands. All registered the same time: 12.01. 'They were driven by a master clock,' Stacey told him. 'When that stopped they all seized at the same moment. One minute after midnight, thirty-seven years ago. 'Conrad looked at his wristwatch, noted that it was just 2.45 p.m.

… Never had he visualized so many clocks, in places so dense that they obscured each other. Their faces were multi-coloured: red, blue, yellow, green. Most of them carried four or five hands. Although the master hands had stopped at a minute past twelve, the subsidiary hands had halted at varying positions, apparently dictated by their colour. 'What were the extra hands for?' he asked Stacey. 'And the different colours?'

'Time zones. Depending on your professional category and the consumer shifts allowed. Think of the problems, though. Trans-porting fifteen million office workers to and from the centre every day, routeing in an endless stream of cars, buses, trains, helicopters, linking every office, almost every desk, with a videophone, every apartment with television, radio, power, water, feeding and entertaining this enormous number of people, guarding them with ancillary services, police, fire squads, medical units - it all hinged on one factor.'

Stacey threw a fist out at the great tower clock. 'Time! Only by synchronizing every activity, every footstep forward or back-ward, every meal, bus-halt and telephone call, could the organism support itself. Like the cells in your body, which proliferate into mortal cancers if allowed to grow in freedom, every individual here had to subserve the overriding needs of the city or fatal bottlenecks threw it into total chaos. You and I can turn on the tap any hour of the day or night, because we have our own private water cisterns, but what would happen here if everybody washed the breakfast dishes within the same ten minutes?'

But how did they enforce all this?'

'By a system of coloured passes, coloured money, an elaborate set of schedules published every day like the TV or radio pro-grammes. And, of course, by all the thousands of clocks you can see around you here. The subsidiary hands marked out the number of minutes remaining in any activity period for people in the clock's colour category.'

Stacey pointed up at the tower. 'This was the Big Clock, the master from which all others were regulated. Central Time Con-trol, a sort of Ministry of Time, gradually took over the old parliamentary buildings as their legislative functions diminished. The programmers were, effectively, the city's absolute rulers.'

At the Exchequer “Tabel”


A new standard in Country Train Services THE COMMISSIONER make their escape to Ettamogah for a geta-

way naughty weekend.

I hate to say this, but many of the other people pictured in this 1949 NSWGR bro-chure don’t scrub up as well. They have a decidedly shifty and wooden look– per-haps they were borrowed from the manne-quin store at David Jones?

From the earliest days there was always a day train to Albury—in 1891, an “Express Mixed”, taking nearly 14 hours. The River-ina Express was introduced before WWII,

leaving before lunch and arriving after dark. After WWII, the departure time was put back to make the train a daylight run-ner. In its last incarnation, run by an XPT, the running time had been halved to 7h20m. Times are from the WTTs of the day.

The 1949 “re-vamp”, with its 40 minute speed-up was an instant hit here, and also overseas, if the English cigarette card on our rear cover is any indication.

T hey were the best of times, they were the worst of times.

In the post-war austerity, people craved for something swish. An air-conditioned Express Train was just the ticket.

In 1949, American movies and records were all the rage. It was de rigeur for wom-en to look like one of the Andrews Sisters and for men to look like Cary Grant. So here (our cover) we have the pair about to

the times december 2014 - timetable

Documents